“I want to talk to you.”
“Sure,” Iris says carefully. “I made some iced tea. Let’s take it outside.” Lannie goes out onto the deck to the picnic table and benches. As she shuts the screen door behind her, she hears Iris opening and closing the fridge. When Iris comes out a moment later carrying a tray with a pitcher of iced tea on it and two tall glasses, Lannie is seated on the bench facing her.
“I don’t need iced tea,” she says, through clenched teeth. Iris’s smile wavers slightly and is replaced by a frown that she also erases. “Iris,” Lannie says. “For God’s sake, sit down.” Iris puts the tray down on the table and slides onto the bench across from her. Lannie can see her resisting her need to fill the glasses, and she reaches across the table and takes Iris’s wrist firmly in her hand to prevent her. Iris flinches. “Listen to me.”
“I am listening,” Iris says in a clear, precise voice. Lannie withdraws her hand then, realizes she has been counting on Iris’s weakness, and Iris’s weakness isn’t there any more. Both of them stare at the red mark that’s fading from her wrist.
“I want to know about my mother,” she says. “Tell me about my mother.” Iris gazes out across the yard to the row of steel bins that shine in the sun. The faint roar of the combine Vance is driving floats across fields to them. She opens her mouth, but Lannie interrupts, “I want the truth.”
“The truth!” Iris says then. “You think I know the truth?” There is such irony in this response that Lannie draws back. Then Iris lowers her head, embarrassed apparently, and says in a low voice, “I didn’t know her well. You look exactly like her. She was very pretty, but she was — I think she was weak. Which you are not.”
“Weak,” Lannie repeats.
“She was raised in foster homes.”
“I know that,” Lannie says.
“Well, think about it!” Iris snaps. “What did she know about being a wife or a mother? Batted around the way she was from pillar to post when she was a girl. I suppose she thought Howard would save her — he was so big and strong —”
“Did she love me?” Lannie cries.
“She adored you.”
“Adored me?” Lannie repeats uncertainly.
“Yes,” Iris says firmly. “She told me herself that you were the best thing that ever happened to her. She couldn’t get over how beautiful you were, or how smart. She had no time for Howard for a couple of years after you were born. I think that was part of the trouble between them, I mean, that she couldn’t see Howard any more for this baby she had, that in some strange way I can’t quite figure out but I see it now —”
“What!” Lannie cries.
“That mothering you was like having a mother — like it was filling up the emptiness from not being mothered herself — You were everything to her.” Lannie has been leaning toward Iris, her back rigid, her eyes not leaving Iris’s. Now, she relaxes a little.
“Dad was jealous?” she murmurs.
“Maybe, I don’t know,” Iris says. “But he was always rough and angry — you know that — and I don’t think it could have worked out anyway. He was fighting with Luke, and he was jealous of Barney because Barney was Luke’s real son and he wasn’t. He took his anger out on Dorothy a lot, I think.” Lannie winces at this, remembering his voice shattering her sleep. “Then Dillon came along, and then Misty, and by then Dorothy was getting worn out. She just seemed exhausted by it all. And I think she was depressed.” She says this last sentence slowly, as if she’s just becoming sure of what she has said.
“I remember her not getting up in the morning,” Lannie says suddenly. “I remember getting breakfast for the three of us before Dill and I went to school. I don’t know why Dad wasn’t there.”
“He’d drive up to the ranch early to work,” Iris said. “Sometimes he wouldn’t come home at night. After he quarrelled with Luke finally, he got a job near Medicine Hat and then he’d only come home on weekends. When your mother got sick —” Lannie’s head goes up at this, to stare at Iris. “He took her straight to the hospital, but it was the weekend, the doctor had gone to Swift Current for the day and his replacement was busy with a heart attack over in Antelope. By the time he got back it was too late. She died within minutes.”
“Were you there?” Iris shakes her head no.
“She was gone by the time I arrived. Howard was inconsolable.”
“Where was I?” Lannie asks, then, “Inconsolable?”
“At home with Dillon and Misty. He’d phoned his mother to come and get you. Yes. Inconsolable.”
“What do you mean?”
Iris sighs, passes her hand across her face, as if remembering all this wearies her. “He cried. He tried to pick Dorothy up and carry her away as if he thought he could bring her back to life. Or maybe, he just didn’t want death to have her. The doctor stopped him. He broke the glass in the hospital door on his way out he banged it so hard.”
“You saw this?”
“I was coming up the steps with Barney, but I don’t think he even noticed us.”
“I don’t remember this.”
“You weren’t there. Mary Ann took you three home with her.”
“Dad?”
“Nobody saw him again until the next day. Barney made the funeral arrangements. It was meningitis, they think.” There is a long silence during which Lannie tries to take all of this in.
“Does he deserve,” she hesitates, “some kind of — sympathy?”
“Don’t we all?”
Lannie has turned sideways on the bench as if she plans to get up and walk away.
“Did he love us?” she asks. Iris is silent for a long moment and Lannie feels such a hard, sharp pain in the centre of her chest as she waits for the reply, thinking now that she already knows what it will be.
“I don’t know, Lannie,” Iris says. “I think he did in his way. I think he tried to love you —” She falls silent again. Then continues, in a voice so different that Lannie steals a glance at her. “His own father had rejected him. Mary Ann left him because he was violent and a drunk, and then she married Luke. Luke had trouble loving him, I think. Luke has trouble loving, period,” she finishes. Lannie swings her other leg over the bench and sits for a moment with her back to Iris. Then she stands, slowly, not knowing where she’s going. Iris says quickly, “Lannie!” so she turns back to her questioningly. The words burst out of Iris, low, fast, as if she’s been holding them back a long time.
“I was going to clear out your room — I went through your old book bag, from university, I mean, I found …” Iris stops, staring into Lannie’s eyes.
“What,” she says softly, involuntarily.
“I found some — notes. In the zipper compartment on the side.”
“Notes?”
“From men —” Lannie takes a step backward away from her. “I put them away and forgot about them because I was sure there had to be some explanation — like, maybe, they weren’t yours. But then, when I knew I would go to find you, I thought of them again. And now that you’re back, I can’t stop thinking about them.” Iris waits, her eyes on Lannie’s face.
“I have to go,” Lannie says, but now Iris reaches out and catches her wrist, holding it tightly. Without letting go or taking her eyes away, she rises, comes around the table to Lannie’s side, and stands, her back to the railing, facing Lannie, still holding her wrist.
“I want to know what that was all about.”
“No. No you don’t want to know.”
“So, they are yours,” Iris says, at last, and her cheeks flush with pink and her dark eyes take on a new light. Lannie lifts her head and meets Iris’s gaze.
“You seemed to think I was full of virtue. As if losing your mother purified you — made you into a saint. Or else so exhausted you, you wouldn’t have the energy for evil,” she says, not looking at Iris. “I was angry with you for that, too,” she mutters.
“Too?” Iris asks, and when Lannie merely glares at her, goes on. “Maybe I did think that.
Maybe I was too …” Then softly, “What are you telling me?”
“Let go of me,” Lannie cries. Iris releases her quickly; she seems to have forgotten she’s holding her. “I am not a good person. If you could see inside me —”
“I can!” Iris cries. This silences Lannie and in the moment she is stilled, she looks into Iris’s face and sees some new seriousness there that reminds her of Abubech.
“You’d see that I have failed to be — what you wanted me to be — I was never what you thought I was —”
“Lannie!” Iris cries. “It’s all right! You don’t have to tell me!”
But now she’s started, she can’t stop, she doesn’t want to stop. “When I was at college? When you thought I was eating pizzas with my gang, going to dances and movies, playing cards in the student union lounge like you did. Well, I wasn’t. I was going to bars and drinking and picking up men. Men I didn’t know. Men I never saw again. I lied about my name, what I did, where I lived. I went to their rooms with them. I did what they wanted me to do. I —”
“All right,” Iris says quietly. “That’s enough, Lannie. You don’t have to say any more. It’s all right.”
“You wanted to know,” Lannie cries, and when she hears the ungovernable pain in her own voice, she tries to quiet herself. Iris puts her arms around her and pulls her close. Lannie, her face pressed against Iris’s hair, doesn’t move, although she finds now she yearns to collapse there, to give up all resistance. She struggles with herself, feeling Iris’s fingers smoothing back her hair.
Now Iris stiffens and steps back, releasing Lannie.
“Your baby — you didn’t know who the father was. It wasn’t Tim. That’s why you swallowed James Springer’s pills. Isn’t it?”
“Would you have wanted to live if you were me? Knowing what you know now?” she asks.
“And yet, you must have wanted that baby,” Iris says. “You tried to kill yourself, and the baby, but, nonetheless, you’ve blamed me for making you have an abortion.”
“I didn’t!” Lannie denies, and then, “I did. It’s true. I’m — sorry. I —” But what can she say to explain to Iris what she doesn’t understand herself? “I haven’t menstruated for years,” she hears herself tell her, and recognizes consciously at last, the full implications of this devastating fact.
And her own anger confuses her. What genuine grievance has she against Iris who fed and clothed her when her parents left her, who mothered her as best she knew how? She feels herself whirling back through time: the day she left here ten years earlier, the day she understood Barney desired her although he would not, had never touched her; the day she knew Iris was having an affair with James Springer and had hated her for it and, wanting to die, although not solely because of their affair, she had swallowed his sleeping pills and only later, back from the dead, had forgiven Iris; the day her father brought her here; the day her mother died.
Grandma Mary Ann coming into the house, walking so quietly, her face soft and sort of hollow, holding Lannie pressed against her stomach while she smoothed back Lannie’s hair and smoothed it back over and over again so that Lannie knew that her mother wouldn’t be coming back.
She had screamed and hit Mary Ann. She had struggled and pulled away from that hand that was smoothing her hair and hit her over and over again, flailing with both fists against her grandmother’s stomach and thighs and arms until Grandpa Luke had grabbed her, picked her up bodily, carried her out of the house, and put her in the truck beside him. After a moment Mary Ann had followed them, Dillon walking ahead of her, his eyes fixed on the sidewalk, Misty asleep in her arms.
Then, suddenly, she remembers the look on Iris’s face when her father brought her here and said, “Look after her for me, Iris, will you?” In that expression Lannie saw Iris’s refusal.
Barney broke in, “You know we will. Until you’re ready to make a home for them again.” And Iris still standing there. Lannie had seen all that through a sort of haze that for a long time had sat between herself and the rest of the world, a gauzy veil through which she saw everything happening as if her life were only a dream, and not real at all: Iris standing there looking at Lannie as if she were a worm, or a disease she was afraid of catching.
“You didn’t want me,” Lannie says, and hates herself.
Iris blanches, then colour comes rushing back and she says, “For about five minutes I didn’t want you. I was selfish and childish and Howard took me completely by surprise. All I had to do was look at you for a minute and then I wanted you. And I have wanted you ever since.” She turns away to look out over the railing at the caragana hedge and the ripe crop bending in the wind as it waits for the combine and the grid road to town beyond it. When she speaks, her voice is muffled. “You resisted me, you refused me, no matter what I said or did. You would not unbend and let me be your mother.”
Lannie finds herself moving to Iris’s side. The wind that buffeted them now and then has quietened, and overhead very high in the sky a jet stream arches silently. They stand quietly side by side, looking out over the countryside.
“How could I trust anyone?” Lannie asks. “If my mother and my father both could go away and leave me, how could I trust you and Barney not to do the same? How could I trust anyone or anything at all?” Now she realizes Iris has always known this, and not known what to do, beyond never leaving herself.
She finds herself thinking about Mariam, the little girl she loved so long ago, in the famine camp in Ethiopia. She’d be maybe sixteen now, she would have suffered the trauma of her ritual mutilation. If she had survived it, she might even be a mother herself. Mariam had lost everyone and still she had smiled at Lannie and held out her arms to her. But no, she can’t weigh her own losses against Mariam’s. She long ago gave up such foolish, pointless machinations, as if they might make any difference to the weight of her lot. Fate singled her out; fate chose her.
Now she remembers a long ago visit to the rock churches at Lalibela, a vacation she’d taken with some of the men and women she’d been working with after the crops had begun to grow again, the people had dispersed, and the camp had closed. The painting high on the wall, or perhaps it was the ceiling of one of the churches, of the Virgin Mary spinning as the angel Gabriel announces Mary’s fate to her. She remembers that in the painting Mary is an Ethiopian woman; she gazes up mutely at the angel, who is not in the painting, her black eyes wide with wonder and fear, her left arm arrested high above her shoulder as she draws up the red spinning thread.
“Lannie?” Iris has been speaking to her. Lannie turns to her.
“Do you remember how in the story of the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve are driven out because Eve tempts him with the apple?”
“Of course I do,” Iris says. “It was the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and when God comes, Eve blames it on the serpent, and Adam blames it on her. And then women have to bear children in sorrow, or something, ever since, as punishment.”
“It’s a dumb story,” Lannie declares. “There’s another one that’s just as true. I’m beginning to think it’s truer.”
“Tell me,” Iris asks softly.
Lannie tells her about the maiden Persephone, who had been stolen from her mother by Hades while she was gathering flowers in a meadow, and taken in his chariot down to his underworld kingdom. Her mother, Demeter, had gone to Zeus to beg him to intercede with Hades and return her daughter to her. Zeus agreed, but on the condition that she must not have eaten anything while she was below. But Hades had offered Persephone a pomegranate, and she had eaten some of it, and thus, the Fates decreed that she might return to her mother and the sunlit world of her girlhood for only half the year, while she must spend the other half below as Hades’s sorrowful queen in the realms of the dead.
“Oh, I see,” Iris says. “It’s another kind of Fall — the Fall of maidens stolen from the safety and innocence of their mothers’ world into the world of men.”
“Something like that.”
“I think it’s true,” Iris says. “So men accuse women of stealing their innocence and driving them out of the Garden of Eden, and women accuse men of the same.”
“Only we don’t beat and starve and rape and mutilate men,” Lannie says. “We don’t want to own all the land; we don’t start wars; we don’t —”
She’s thinking of Ethiopia now, of all she was a witness to there, and of all she did. I was not just a voyeur of others’ suffering; if I went there for the wrong reasons, I stayed and worked until I earned the right to be there. A burden she has been carrying lifts with this thought, leaving a strange pleasing lightness.
Iris is speaking. “I know that’s all true, but it seems to me that it’s not the whole truth about men and women. It seems to me the true story is bigger than that.” She falls into a silence.
“What do you mean?” Lannie asks, puzzled. Then she thinks how all her life there has been nothing she wouldn’t give to have had a mother.
The Garden of Eden
Down in this narrow valley there isn’t a breath of wind, the tall pines stand motionless, the leaves of the few deciduous trees dotted among them now turned golden or red. The stream runs past quickly, a moving ribbon of sunlight, so shallow that with the window rolled down Iris hears its passage as a slight, tinkling song. The corrals are empty, there’s not an animal in sight, but the small cabin looks exactly the same as that terrible day she came here through rain and mud with Luke. She shudders, but this is a journey she has to complete.
After the long, dry summer the stream is barely ten feet wide and at its deepest it’s well below her boot-tops. She moves slowly, remembering crossing the swollen stream, a rope looped over her shoulder, falling, half drowning, pulling herself upright, gasping and choking while water coursed over her. As she moves up the slope toward the cabin, she feels a tightening at the bottom of her throat. The place is eery, the sun-and-shade dappling on the cabin walls, its very stillness in the warm fall light, seem to carry a message that she isn’t sure she’d want to read if she could. She reaches the door, lifts the latch, and steps inside.
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